Language: English

Speaker: Anthony P. D’Costa (University of Alabama in Huntsville)

Title: Compressed Capitalism and the Persistence of Informal Labor Markets in India

Abstruct: Since the economic reforms of the 1990s, India has experienced considerable growth. However, employment growth has not been robust except in some sectors and the bulk of the Indian workforce are in the informal sector. To explain this counterintuitive outcome, I offer a macro-historical framework to understand why and how economic growth does not transform labor markets and instead continues to reproduce the informal sector.

Short Bio: Anthony P. D’Costa holds the position of Eminent Scholar in Global Studies and Professor of Economics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and is an Honorary Professor of the University of Melbourne. In the last thirty-three years, he served as the Chair and Professor of Contemporary Indian Studies and Director of the Development Studies Program, University of Melbourne; the A.P. Moller-Maersk Professor of Indian Studies, Copenhagen Business School; Visiting Senior Fellow, National University of Singapore; and Professor of Comparative International Development, University of Washington. He has written or edited twelve books, nearly one hundred academic articles and book chapters, and delivered nearly two hundred lectures worldwide. He was a recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Abe from the Japan Foundation, which led to the 2016 book “International Mobility, Global Capitalism, and Changing Structures of Accumulation: Transforming the Japan-India IT Relationship.” He is currently editing The Oxford Handbook on the ‘New’ Space Economy and working on a book titled “Introduction to Indian Business and Economic Development.”